VERONIKA DECIDES TO DIE

Read on some of the saints:
Ignatius Loyola
Teresa of Avila
Anthony
Francis of Assisi

The story is about a 24 year old female who decides to take a bottle of sleeping pills as she finds that her existence is so repetitive and that freedom is ultimately found in death. She takes the pills one by one and eventually goes unconscious; wakes up in a mental hospital called the Villette which is in Slovenia. When she wakes up she finds out that she has approximately 5 days to live. She begins by wanting to kill herself again but later starts experiencing new things that she had never experienced before. She becomes humiliated by others laughing at her for passing through an area; she slaps a man in the face for being mean to her; she plays the piano without permission, which she later realizes was her childhood dream; her attachment to Eduard the schizofrenic who she falls in love with. She hears different stories of the people in Villette. She falls in love with Eduard because he is the only one that recognizes her true beauty and when she is playing the piano. She masturbates in front of him and has an amazing orgasm. He later talks to her which is a surprise because he was a mute until this point.

Zedka - She was a mistress when she was young and was loved by another man who was married. She dreamed that he would eventually leave his wife to be married to her and craved his love. Later he ended it with her and she felt that extremely depressed because she wanted to be loved. Eventually the feelings subsided for a while and then she was married and had children. When everything became mundane she became depressed again about her lost love. She told the story about the poet who never got the girl of his dreams and eternally gazes into the church of the one he fell in love with. She also tells Veronika of the story of the king and the madness of his people by drinking from a fountain that was poisoned by a magician and how the king and queen decided to drink from the fountain so they were not overthrown by the people who had thought of revolting because the king and queen weren't considered normal (which the normal was now madness).

Mari - a very competant lawyer who started experiencing panic attacks; the first one in a movie theater the next one at work; she is initially hesitant to receive medical attention but after repetitive attacks she decides to check and finds that there is nothing physically wrong with her. She eventually decides to go to Villette and her old law firm doesn't want to risk a reputational hit so they say she can't come back even though she feels like it will help her to return to work; even she voluntarily resigned. Her husband divorces her. She is the only one Eduard opens up to and she is part of the Fraternity. She also starts being nice to Veronika.

Eduard - The schizophrenic that in childhood became inspired by the philosophers and saints and religious leaders of the past that stepped out of their shell of normal existence. He realized he wanted to become a painter and wanted to paint all of the souls of the greats in the past. He started failing in school and reading books on positive energy and negative energy and witchcraft and things of spiritual nature. His father became worried that this would effect his reputation because he was a diplomat from Slovenia living in Brazil at the time. So he asked Eduard in the name of love can you quit painting and focus on school and become a diplomat. Eduard later lost his mental faculties after agreeing and was placed in the Villette when the family returned from Brazil to Slovenia. He becomes a mute but only opens up to Mari and Veronika.

Dr. Igor was head of the Villette and had come up with a thesis for Psychology that Vitriol (or bitterness) was responsible for people becoming insane. Because eventually people could not cope with the everyday repetitive tasks of life. But that the eventual cure (which the reader is introduced at the end of the book) is an awareness of life and death. He had also lied to Veronika about her dying in 5 days but she never finds out. He used her as a guinea pig of sorts because he knew that she would likely kill herself anyways; so he wanted to induce an urgency to appreciate life and the present moment and that everyday of life was a miracle.


"Nothing in this world happens by chance". pg 2

Two very simple reasons lay behind her decision to die, and she was sure that, were she to leave a note explaining many people would agree with her.
The first reason: Everything in her life was the same and, once her youth was gone, it would be downhill all the way, with old age beginning to leave irreversible marks, the onset of illness, the departure o friends. She would gain nothing by continuing to live; indeed, the likelihood of suffering would only increase.
The second reason was more philosophical: Veronika read the newspapers, watched TV, and she was aware of what was going in the world. Everything was wrong, and she had no way of putting things right - that gave her sense of complete powerlessness. pg7

Veronika was certain that everything ended in death. That is why she had chosen suicide: freedom at last. Eternal oblivion.

"I'm going to tell you a story," said Zedka. "A powerful wizard, who wanted to destroy an entire kingdom, placed a magic potion in the well from which all the inhabitants drank. Whoever drank that water would go mad.
"The following morning, the whole population drank from the well and they all went mad, apart from the king and his family, who had a well set aside for them alone; which the magician had not managed to poison. The king was worried and tried to control the population by issuing a series of edicts governing security and public health. The policemen and the inspectors, however, had also drunk the poisoned water, and they thought the king's decisions were absurd and resovled to take no notice of them.
"When the inhabitants of the kingdom heard the decrees, they became convinced that the king had gone mad and was now giving nonsensical orders. They marched on the castle and called for his abdication.
"In despair the king prepared to step down from the throne, but the queen stopped him, saying: 'let us go and drink from the communal well. Then we will be the same as them.'
"And that was what they did: The king and the queen drank the water of madness and immediately began talking nonsense. Their subjects repented at once; now that the king was displaying such wisdom, why not allow him to continue ruling the country?
"The country continued to live in peace, although its inhabitants behaved very differently from those of its neighbors. And the king was able to govern until the end of his days."
pg 34

[Zedka's story] One evening, she walked past the statue of Preseren, the great Slovene poet, and she began to think about his life. When he was 34, he went into a church and saw a an adolescent girl, Julia Primic, with whom he fell passionately in love. Like the ancient minstrels, he began to write her poems, in the hope of one day marrying her.
*** It turned out that Julia was the daughter of an upper middle-class family and apart from that chance sighting inside the church. Preseren never again magnaged to get near her. But that encunter inspired his finest poetry and created a whole legend around his name. In the small central square of Llubljana, the statue of the poet stares fixedly at something. If you follow his gaze, you will see, on the other side of the square, the face of a woman carved into the stone of one of the houses. That was where Julia had lived. Even after death Preseren gazes for all eternity on his Impossible Love.
pg 57

"Do you remember the first question I ever asked you?" said Zedka
"Yes, you asked me if I knew what being crazy meant" said Veronika
"Exactly. This time I'm not going to tell you a story. I'll just say that insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It's as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that's going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don't understand the language they speak there."
"We've all felt that."
"And all of us, one way or another, are insane." pg 62

Veronika pushed open the door to the living room, went over to the piano, opened the lid, and summoning up all her strength pounded on the keys. A mad, cacophonous, jangled chord echoed around the empty room, bounced off the walls, and returned to her in the guise of a shrill sound that seemed to tear at her soul. Yet it was an accurate portrait of her soul at the moment.
She pounded the keys again and again the dissonant notes reverberated around her.
"I'm crazy. I'm allowed to do this. I can hate, I can pound away at the piano. Since when have mental patients known how to play notes in the right order?"
She pounded the piano again, once, twice, ten, twenty times and each she did it, her hatred seemed to diminish until it vanished completely.

Then once more, a deep peace flooded through her and Veronika again looked out at the starry sky and at the new moon, her favorite, filling the room she was in with gentle light. The impression returned of Infinity and Eternity walking hand in hand; you only had to look for one of them - for example, the limitless universe - to feel the presence of the other, Time that never ends, that never passes, that remains in the Present, where all of life's secrets lie. As she had been walking from the ward to that room, she had felt such pure hatred that now she had no more rancor left in her heart. She had finally allowed her negative feelings to surface, feelings that had been repressed for years in her soul. She had actually felt them, and they were no longer necessary they could leave.

She sat on in silence, enjoying the present moment, letting love fill up the empty space left behind by hatred. When she felt the moment had come, she turned to the moon and played a sonata of homage to it, knowing that the moon was listening and would feel proud and that this would provoke the jealousy of the stars. Then she played music for the stars, for the garden, for the mountains she could not see in the darkness but which she knew were there.
WHile she was playing that music for the garden, another crazy person appeared; Eduard, a schizophrenic who was beyond all cure. She was not frightened by his presence; on the contrary, she smiled and to her surprise, he smiled back.
The music could penetrate even his remote world, more distant than the moon itself; it could even perform miracles.
pg 69

[conversation between Dr. Igor and Veronika]]
"You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?"
"It's whatever the majority deems it to be. It's not necessarily the best or the most logical, but its the one that supports the desires of society as a whole. You see this thing I've got around my neck?"
"You mean your tie?"
"Exactly. Your answer is the logical, coherent answer an absolutely normal person would give; It's a tie! A lunatic however, would say that what I have round my neck is a ridiculous, useless bit of colored cloth tied in a very complicated way, which makes it harder to get air into your lungs and difficult to turn your neck. I have to be careful when I'm anywhere near a fan or I could be strangled by this bit of cloth.
"If a lunatic were to ask me what this tie is for, I would have to say, absolutely nothing. It's not even purely decorative, since nowadays it's a become a symbol of slavery, power and alloofness. The only really useful function a tie serves is the sense of relief when you get home and take it off; you feel as if you've freed yourself from something, though quite what you don't know.
"But does that sense of relief justify the existence of ties? No. Nevertheless, if I were to ask a madman and a normal person what this is, the sane person would say: "A tie". IT doesn't matter who's correct, what matters is who's right."
pg87

[When Veronika sits and hears the story about the wise Sufi teacher Nasrudin]
When she opened the door, she came upon an unusual scene; the tables and chairs had been pushed back against the walls, forming a large central space. There, sitting on the floor, were the members of the Fraternity, listening to a man in a suit and tie.
"... then they invited Nasrudin, the great master of the Sufi tradition, to give a lecture," he was saying.
When the door opened, everyone in the room looked at Veronika. The man in the suit turned to her.
"Sit down."
She sat down on the floor next to Mari, the white-haired woman who had been so aggressive on their first encounter. To Veronika's surprise, Mari gave her a welcoming smile.
The man in the suit went on: "Nasrudin arranged to give a lecture at 2 O'Clock in the afternoon, and it looked set to be a great success: The thousand seats were completely sold out and more than 700 people were left outside, watching the lecture on closed-circuit television.
"At 2 ol'clock precisely an assistant of Nasrudin's came in saying that for unavoidable reasons the lecture would begin late. Some got up indignantly, asked for their money back, and left. Even so a lot of people remained both inside and outside the lecture hall.
"By four in the afternoon, the Sufi master had still not appeared, and people gradually began to leave the place, picking up their money at the box office. THe working day was coming to an end; it was time to go home. By 6 o'clock the original 1700 spectators had dwindled to less than 100.
"At that moment Nasrudin came in. He appeared to be extremely drunk and began to flirt with a beautiful young woman sitting in the front row.
"Astonished the people who remained began to feel indignant. How could the man behave like that after making them wait 4 solid hours? There were some disapproving murmurs, but the Sufi master ignored them. He went on, in a loud voice, to say how sexy the young woman was, and invited her to go with him to France".
Some teacher! thought Veronika. Just as well I've never believed in such things.
"After cursing the people who were complaining. Nasrudin tried to get up but fell heavily to the floor. Disgusted, more people decided to leave, saying it was pure charlatanism, that they would denounce the degrading spectacle to the press.
Only 9 people remained. As soon as the final group of outraged spectators had left, Nasrudin got up; he was completely sober, his eyes glowed, and he had about him an air of great authority and wisdom. "Those of you who stayed are the ones who will hear me," he said. "You have passed through the two hardest tests on the spiritual road: the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what you encounter. It is you I will teach."
pg 98

In Mari's view this difficulty was due not to chaos or disorganization or anarchy, but to an excess of order. Society had more and more rules, and laws that contradicted the rules, and new rules that contradicted the laws. People felt too frightened to take even a step outside the invisible regulations that guided everyone's lives.
pg 105

No I was the one who wanted to die. She turned back to the piano. In the last days of her life, she had finally realized her grand dream: to play with heart and soul for as long as she wanted and whenever the mood took her. IT didn't matter to her that her only audience was a young schizophrenic; he seemed to understand the music, and that was what mattered.
pg 113

No, she must stop thinking. That's how she could be brought to sanity.
pg 118

"I want to do something completely different with my life. I want to have an adventure, help other people, do something I've never done before".
pg 120

"I feel like starting to live again, Eduard. I feel like making the mistakes I always wanted to make, but never had the courage to, facing up to the feelings of panic that might well come back, but whose presence will merely weary me, since I know, I'm not going to die or faint because of them. I can make new friends and teach them how to be crazy too in order to be wise. I'll tell them not to follow the manual of good behavior but to discover their own lives, desires, adventures, and to LIVE. I'll quote from Ecclesiastes to the Catholics, from the Koran to the Muslims, from the Torah to the Jews, from Aristotle to the atheists. I never want to be a lawyer again, but I can use my experience to give lectures about men and women who knew the truth about this existence of ours and whose writings can be summed up in one word; LIVE. If you live, God will live with you. If you refuse to run his risks, he'll retreat to that distant heaven and be merely a subject for philosophical speculation. Everyone knows this, but no one takes the first step, perhaps for fear of being called insane. At least, we haven't got that fear, Eduard. We've already been inmates of Villete."
pg152

"We all live in our own world. But if you look up at the starry sky, you'll see that all the different worlds up there combine to form constellations, solar systems, galaxies."
pg 162

"Have you ever been to Florence?" asked Dr. Igor.
"No."
"You should go there; it's not far, for that is where you will find my second example. In the cathedral in Florecne, there's a beautiful clock designed by Pauolo Uccello in 1443. Now, the curious thing about this clock is that, although it keeps time like all other clocks, its hands go in the opposite direction to that of normal clocks."
"What's that got to do with my illness?"
"I'm just coming to that. WHen he made this clock, Paolo Uccello was not trying to be original: The fact is that , at the time, there were clocks like his as well as others with hands that went in the direction we're familiar with now. For some unknown reason, perhaps because the duke had a clock with hands that went in the direction we now think of as the "right" direction that became the only direction and Uccello's clock then seemed an aberration, a madness."
Dr. Igor paused, but he knew that Mari was following his reasoning.
"So, let's turn to your illness: Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective way of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone in your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not in the other?"
"No."
"If someone were to ask, the response they'd get would probably be: 'you're crazy.' If they persisted, people would try to come up with a reason, but they'd soon change the subject, because there isn't a reason apart from the one I've just given you. So to go back to your question. What was it again?"
"Am I cured?"
"No. You're someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view , is a serious illness."
"Is wanting to be different as serious illness?"
"It is if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. It's a distortion of nature, it goes against God's laws, for in all the world's woods and forests, he did not create a single leaf the same as another. But you think it's insane to be different, and that's why you chose to live in Villete, because everyone is different here, and so you appear to be the same as everyone else. Do you understand?"
pg 169

"Then last night, I heard a woman playing the piano. She played superbly, in a way I've rarely heard before. As I was listenting to the music, I thought of all those who had suffered in order to compose those sonatas, preludes, adagios: How foolish they must have been made to feel when they played their pieces - which were, after all different - to those who held sway in the world of music then. I thought about the difficulties and humiliations involved in getting someone to fund an orchestra. I thought of the booing public who was not yet used to such harmonies.
"Worse than the composers' suffering, though, was the fact that the girl was playing the music with such soul because she knew she was going to die. And am I not going to die? where is my soul that I might play the music of my own life with such enthusiasm?"
pg170

Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains.
pg 198

"... the danger of an adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort."
pg 199

For a few moments, he was assailed by another doubt: Sooner or later Veronika would realize that she wasn't going to die of a heart attack. She would probably go to a specialist who would tell her that her heart was perfectly normal. She would decide that the doctor who had taken care of her in Villete was a complete incompetent; but then, all those who dare to research into forbidden subjects require both a certain amount of courage and a good dose of incomprehension.
But what about the many days that she would have to live with the fear of imminent death?
Dr. Igor pondered the arguments long and hard and decided that it didn't really matter. She would consider each day a miracle - which indeed it is, when you consider the number of unexpected things that could happen in each second of our fragile existences.
pg 209